Several people reported testing failures after setting CLOCK_REALTIME close
to the limits of the kernel internal representation in nanoseconds,
i.e. year 2262.
The failures are exposed in subsequent operations, i.e. when arming timers
or when the advancing CLOCK_MONOTONIC makes the calculation of
CLOCK_REALTIME overflow into negative space.
Now people start to paper over the underlying problem by clamping
calculations to the valid range, but that's just wrong because such
workarounds will prevent detection of real issues as well.
It is reasonable to force an upper bound for the various methods of setting
CLOCK_REALTIME. Year 2262 is the absolute upper bound. Assume a maximum
uptime of 30 years which is plenty enough even for esoteric embedded
systems. That results in an upper bound of year 2232 for setting the time.
Once that limit is reached in reality this limit is only a small part of
the problem space. But until then this stops people from trying to paper
over the problem at the wrong places.
Reported-by: Xiongfeng Wang <wangxiongfeng2@huawei.com>
Reported-by: Hongbo Yao <yaohongbo@huawei.com>
Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Cc: John Stultz <john.stultz@linaro.org>
Cc: Stephen Boyd <sboyd@kernel.org>
Cc: Miroslav Lichvar <mlichvar@redhat.com>
Cc: Arnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de>
Cc: Richard Cochran <richardcochran@gmail.com>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/alpine.DEB.2.21.1903231125480.2157@nanos.tec.linutronix.de
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